Knowledge systems at CMS Cameron McKenna

Cameron McKenna has always had a good collection of know-how in its London office and has had a central knowledge management system (FREIA) since 1989. However, prior to the implementation of LawPort, the firm used a number of separate systems: the firm's intranet, Mercator; the firm's know how (Merlin using Microsoft Sharepoint), a direct replacement for FREIA; Excel and access databases and contact lists. Each of these systems had to be searched independently and publishing know-how and other information meant being trained and having an understanding of two different processes. As it stood, there was no one place to find everything. This was a key issue for the Content team.

What were we trying to achieve?

There were two key objectives/challenges: ease of access and improving knowledge sharing. Ease of Access, the first challenge the team faced, entailed improving the access to, and the sharing of, practice group know-how through a single interface. At the same time, the team wanted to organise the information available clearly and make its use intuitive. The second challenge we faced was Improving Knowledge Sharing by providing fee-earners with one place to see, publish and review their know-how and make it available alongside daily practice materials. The team was also hoping to improve collaboration by advertising the “publish once, distribute many times” element of LawPort. This would allow a professional support lawyer (PSL) or fee-earner to publish an item, not only to their pages, but also to any page or view they thought might be of interest to others.

The benefits

Users would benefit from a “seamless” desktop experience through the integration of all our internal systems and external sources of information. Users would have a single information source that they would want to contribute to and that would lead to less “information stress” and encourage the sharing of know-how. LawPort would additionally provide a single web-publishing platform and replace several IT systems.

What is LawPort?

LawPort is a portal system supplied by SV Technologies a U.S-based firm. LawPort integrates the many sources of data which are used on a regular basis, and makes them easily accessible via the user's desktop. LawPort does this by drawing together the data contained within the separate systems in a “data warehouse”. These separate systems include our HR system, our finance system, our document management system (DMS), existing know-how from Merlin and from Mercator and links to external information sources (websites and commercial databases). At the very heart of LawPort is a global taxonomy, which enables us to link disparate types of information from a matter to a document and display this information on “views”. (See Figure 1– Data Warehouse)

Figure 1 LawPort – DataWarehouse

Creating and using views

There are seven different types of views on LawPort:

Populating the views

Once we had created the views, the next step was to populate them. Views display components, which in turn have items (information) published to them. These are called Pubitems or Published items. We use a series of Pubitems which describe the different types of information created by the firm. For example Know How Standard Form is a Pubitem, Quicklink is a Pubitem and Document is a Pubitem. Components can display any of these Pubitems provided you have created the component correctly. Components can be anything from lists of items to hyperlinks (weblink) or free text (html). Lots of individual components grouped together will make a view. Components can be created at either a system or a view level. Building system level components allowed us to create templates for the different types of views, so that when fee-earners used them they were familiar with the same groups of components. View level components enabled us to add any additional components to the view we were currently administering. (See Figure 2Components added to a view)

Figure 2 Components added to View

The “Pilot” March 2004

Preceding the pilot the Content team spent a considerable amount of time with each of the teams involved, auditing their documents and determining what they used on a regular basis. Some very practical information was gathered at this stage and was subsequently published to LawPort. The content team also discovered that there were many documents in existence that weren't being shared either within London or between London and our overseas offices. As well as the content team's work on auditing documents, the PSLs in the pilot groups worked on their standard forms and precedents to “fill” any gaps, confirm their usefulness and remove any duplicates.

The content team also spent some time reviewing, revising and removing nodes from the taxonomy; the subject (category) taxonomy especially went though many versions. This was an important piece of work to undertake, as it ensured that PSLs and fee-earners had the appropriate category views to publish their know-how to. It also ensured that they felt comfortable with the pages they were publishing their know-how to. Once the taxonomy was agreed, the team set about “mapping” content from our existing internal systems to it: for instance, the Library catalogue subject terms were mapped to the Subject (Category) Taxonomy and the DOCS Document Types were mapped to the Document type taxonomy, a small part of the Subject (Category) Taxonomy.

Once we were happy that LawPort was working as well as it could be and there was enough content available we made it available to the pilot groups. The pilot groups consisted of two Practice groups Banking and Energy Projects & Construction and two support departments IT and Knowledge & Information Services. The pilot was used as an opportunity for:

• • The groups to “get their hands” on Knowledge Centre.

• • To discuss with users their thoughts about Knowledge Centre, including what could be changed and what couldn't and what should be built into future development.

From user group feedback with the BAIF and EPC teams it became clear that we needed to resolve three key issues:

• • Ease of access

• • The amount of information displayed

• • How the information was displayed

Specifically users told us that the London views were too cluttered and that they would prefer to see a “cut down” view (See Figure 3– Banking & International Finance view pilot version and Figure 4HR View pilot version). They also told us that they didn't want material displayed by type, but by subject. Users didn't care if it was a standard form or a precedent, they just needed to know that it existed and crucially that they could access it. Fee-earners felt that the Personal view wouldn't be used and also that they found searching difficult and when they did return results, they weren't the items they expected to return.

Figure 3 Banking & International Finance View pilot version

Figure 4 HR View pilot version

Users also told us that the Firmwide view was one of the most useful views on Knowledge Centre, as it was almost a portal in its own right, providing links to important/key pages on Knowledge Centre and publishing stories that would be of interest to all members of the firm.

Users were also surprised both at how much content was already on Knowledge Centre and by how much would be available at the end of the rollout. The content team felt that this might have been one of the reasons why the search wasn't perceived in a good light: users simply weren't used to seeing the volume of information that was now available on Knowledge Centre in one place.

Time to leave the building?

Not quite yet. In fact, the pilot had been successful in a number of respects. Users had told us that they loved the use of icons as either shortcuts to other pages on Knowledge Centre, or as shortcuts to commercial/external sources of information. After reviewing all the feedback that we had received from the focus groups, we set about giving Knowledge Centre a new look. This involved:

• • Changing the navigation slightly so that it included more team views.

• • Including more white space to make the views cleaner and clearer.

• • Adding more icons and banners to highlight important resources and information that users should be looking at.

• • Focusing less on components and more on HTML and free text elements.

The results of all these changes were much cleaner and more user-friendly pages. See Figure 5 New Banking and International Finance view and Figure 6 New Human Resources View.

Figure 5 New Banking & International Finance View

Figure 6 New Human Resources View

Training

Training was a key element of the rollout, although for the initial pilot we didn't provide structured training sessions. Instead we worked with power users to identify issues and make small changes/additions to Knowledge Centre once they had been identified. This we did by regularly walking the floors of the practice groups involved in the Pilot. Once the initial pilot was complete, we designed a training session with input from the PSLs, which we implemented with the assistance of the IT training team. The training was tailored to each practice group with appropriate questions and searches and involved an hour of hands-on training. The training was also available as an e-learning package. After training we ensured users were comfortable with the system by having floorwalkers stationed within the practice groups.

What's happening now

The Spark Content team is currently looking at the integration of commercial resources, so increasingly we are planning to add deep links and content from third parties. An example of this is the SCORE Report, which uses Lexis Nexis Publisher to produce a report, which is published to Knowledge Centre. The team is continuing to rebuild some of the older views and this will continue.

The future – what next?

There are a number of improvements to the software that would be useful, especially in relation to the search functionality and the sharing of people expertise or “Know-who”. The Spark team has begun to integrate commercial/external data and this process will no doubt continue especially with the developments in federated searching and the willingness of commercial database to work with firms to integrate their resources. We are also looking closely at social software (Blogs, wikis and RSS feeds). Having already completed a pilot wiki project with our trainees and having established a number of internal blogs, the team is now exploring the possibility of integration of Spark Knowledge Centre with other social media.